Cancun Photographs

Cancun is a strangely shapped region - the hotels along the coast are actually built on a very thin strip of land over 25km long. Betweenthis handle-shaped strip and the 'mainland' of the Yucatan Peninsula is a huge lagoon surrounded by mangrove swamps... complete with nice big iguanas basking in the sunshine! Here is the lagoon - you can see the hotels in the distance stretching along the horizon.

Sunset on the beach at Cancun - the Caribbean sea is a beautiful colour here. Nice waves crashing along the shore!

Playa del Carmen

If you jump onto one of the frequent passenger ferries from Isla Cozumel it’s only an hour-long ride back to Playa del Carmen on the mainland. This little port has thrived over recent years as a resort town. The scuba diving might not be as good here as it is on Cozumel, but Playa offers one very long beach with clear blue-green sea and perfect powdery white sand… which after all is what most holiday goers are interested in!

In other words, Playa del Carmen is a very popular destination - and so the pretty port does feel a little inundated with visitors at times. But there are no cruise ship docks here thankfully, so you don’t get the daily deposits of clueless, stupidly rich tourists you find on Cozumel. Actually the pleasant and lively main street feels more like a busy town in Asia than Central America – we found Playa strongly resembled Phuket for some reason! Yes, there are plenty of tacky souvenir shops, tour touts and over-priced restaurants, but the town is green and leafy, beautifully manicured, and it has a relatively friendly atmosphere.

We only spent two nights in Playa del Carmen – partly because we have very little time left in Mexico now, and partly because we aren’t exactly the type of people to just go to the beach on holiday! OK, we had some lovely walks along the sand in Playa, but we really didn’t fancy the prospect of lying on a sun-bed all day, slowly turning a deeper shade of lobster red… Yes, many people here are really impressively burnt!

Anyway, our next (and last) stop is Cancun. We’ll only be staying another 2 nights in the famous Mexican mega-resort before catching a flight back to London… for yet another wedding – this time for Gary’s best friend, Laura. This year has certainly had distinct themes to break up our travels!

Playa del Carmen Pictures

This is the very pleasent main street of Playa del Carmen - it runs the entire length of the beach, a few blocks parallel to the coast. A nice place - lots of trees, plants, lamps, and of course hugely over-priced tourist restaurants...

The beach! With crashing waves about to soak the lovely Gary... ha ha ha... Beautiful water, no?

We found this flock of gulls continually hovering over the same patch of sand - waiting for some food maybe? They made a very elegent sight in any case!

More of the beautiful beach at Playa del Carmen, this time with me perched on some very spikey rocks.

Isla Cozumel

Isla Cozumel lies just off the eastern coast of Mexico, surrounded by the jade green waters of the Caribbean Sea. It is actually the largest Mexican island - a full 53km long and 14km wide… not exactly a place to explore fully on foot! But to be honest, the main reason to come here isn’t to see the island itself, but to explore some of its spectacular reefs.

Well, at least that’s why a lot of people come to Cozumel (us included). But in reality we were startled to see on our arrival that most visitors aren’t at all interested in diving or snorkelling – or even visiting the reefs in a glass bottom boat to avoid getting their hair wet! No, most people simply shop. And shop. And shop. And have a beer. Before doing yet more shopping.

The only town on the island is called San Miguel de Cozumel, and the main focus of the place is to grab as much money as physically possible from the billions of US tourists that pass through the place every day from the cruise liners. We have never seen so many gigantic cruise ships anywhere before – in the middle of town a pier provides docking space for two boats, and a little to the south of San Miguel you’ll find another larger dock that can take four of the monsters at once! So if you wander through town in the middle of the day it is swamped by middle aged, overweight tourists (complete with silly caps and bum-bags) making their way from one jewellery shop to the next along the sea-front. They manage to migrate away from the cruise ports just far enough inland to see the central plaza (i.e. one block!), waste loads of cash in the oodles of tacky souvenir shops nearby, and then head back towards the ports to slump into a karaoke bar. After the relative peace and quite of our Latin American travels we weren’t quite expecting this!

The effect of the cruise ships on San Miguel is amazing. Touts are everywhere hailing the cruise-people, everyone speaks English to you rather than Spanish, and even the prices in shops and restaurants are quoted in US dollars – we got quizzical looks from the locals when we asked to pay in Mexican Pesos! But strangely most the touts seemed to be able to tell that we aren’t interested in whatever they are selling – we were given far less hassle than any other non-Mexicans wandering about. Perhaps we were a) too young, b) too shabbily dressed, c) too thin and d) wearing no jewellery – i.e. far too poor to be worth pestering!

Anyway, apart from spending a fair amount of fascinating time watching the tourists from the cruise ships get ripped off, we devoted two mornings of our visit to diving. Unfortunately the conditions weren’t exactly optimal – reasonable winds on both days made the sea really choppy, decreased visibility, and ensured that we froze on the boat after the dive. But fortunately Isla Cozumel has particularly good visibility even in adverse conditions, and the wind couldn’t chill us to the bone when we were actually underwater! Oh, and of course the reefs themselves weren’t bad either. One of them had by far the most spectacular coral formations we’ve ever seen – towering masses of multicoloured coral separated by narrow channels perfect for swimming through. As you passed around and under the formations it was even more like exploring a completely different world than usual when diving – utterly stunning.

The marine life was brilliant at times too. OK, we didn’t see the huge numbers of sharks and fish that we did in Tahiti, although four sharks did swim by in the distance once. But we found big gruppas, long barracudas, large lobsters, a cleverly camouflaged flounder, a turtle, and loads of sting rays. The highlight of the dives was when a huge spotted eagle ray easily 2 m wide from wing to wing swam slowly past us only a few meters away. We’ve never had the privilege to watch one of these elegant monsters so closely before. I think we may need to take up underwater photography…

Anyway, now we move back to the mainland, taking a one hour ferry ride to the lively town of Playa del Carmen. This will be our last stop before Cancun and the flight home – our trip through Mexico has been brilliant, but it is passing far too fast!

Isla Cozumel Pictures

A typical scene off the coast of Isla Cozumel: blue sea, pretty pelican, monsterous cruise ships! I mean ships - you can't see it from the angle of this photo, but another of these big iron hulks is lurking behind the 'Norwegian Jewel' in full view. Below is a photo of Gary in the pretty central plaza of town, complete with palm trees and silly water features (erm, a fountain formed by a bronze half-naked mermaid with a giant shell for a head?!). We were quite proud that we skillfully managed to exclude the millions of tourists and touts from the picture!

Sunset of the harbour of San Miguel de Cozumel. Pretty sky, rippling water, big boats...

Tulum

After visiting Chichen Itza we didn’t really pause for breath but hopped straight onto the next bus to the small coastal town of Tulum. This trip around Mexico is pretty hectic – our route from Mexico City to Cancun can be done in a month, but there is a lot to see on the way!

Which of course is why we’re visiting Tulum. This is our first stop on the Mexican section of the Atlantic Ocean - effectively entering the Caribbean. Somewhat typical of this part of the world, Tulum is blessed with vivid green-blue waters and startling white beaches, and so consequently it’s also cursed with plenty of tourists! Perhaps that’s a little unfair – most of the people staying in Tulum town clearly travel independently. But along the coastline northwards towards Playa Del Carmen and Cancun there are plenty of big resorts which are of course designed for package tours. So you see tourists by the busload wandering around Tulum’s Maya complexes in carefully shepherded groups.

We only had a day in Tulum, but we managed to visit two lovely sites. Ok, it involved lots of rapid walking (over 17km by the time we collapsed for the evening), but it was definitely worth the effort. The first complex we visited was Coba, which was a little out of town, but easily reached by an hour long public bus trip. The nice thing about Coba is its jungle setting. A little like Ta Thom of Angkor in Cambodia, this is a place where the lush jungle is trying really hard to reclaim the ancient ruins. Trees grow on top of temple walls, vines hang randomly around, and you have to peer through the shrubbery to make out sections of ruins surrounding you. OK, the site itself is nowhere near as complex as Palenque or Chichen Itza, but it’s a lot of fun to visit nonetheless. Especially as it has two lovely pyramids in beautiful disrepair – you can even climb to the top of one for stunning panoramic views over the jungle and surrounding lakes.

We were very intrigued by the other people who climbed this pyramid. As we had very little for time we made a rapid ascent, caught our breaths and then walked quickly back down again. Actually my descent was more of a rapid trot, as I wanted to get to the ground much faster than Gary so I could take some photos of him coming down! See below for the resulting pictures of course. The interesting thing was that everyone else took ages to walk up and even longer coming down. Most of them seemed to be descending on their bottoms, a step at a time! OK, the steps were a little uneven, but we’ve seen much, much worse. The Great Wall at Simatai, Macha Picchu, Pisac… We were very perplexed at their trouble! On the other hand, as I literally ran down the slope most people stopped and stared at me – perhaps we were the odd ones!

Another good reason for visiting Coba is to have a quick look at the lakes near the site. Why? Crocodiles! We may have failed to see crocs in their natural habitat in Australia, but we saw two of them here – one swimming sleekly along the bank, and the other right under the pier near the ruins. He was beautifully menacing – big teeth and very evil eyes…

After our rapid visit to Coba, we hopped back on the bus to Tulum, and then walked the 3km or so from the town centre to the coast where there is yet another beautiful Maya complex. These ruins (also called Tulum) aren’t as extensive as most of the ones we’ve previously visited, but they also have one of the best locations – right on the cliff top overlooking white beaches and turquoise-blue waves. Beautiful. Even better, they are infested by really big iguanas – we had a great day for lizard spotting! The lazy creatures were completely unperturbed by the humans wandering around, and happily basked in the sun on the cliff tops. Well, the view was magnificent so who can blame them!

Anyway, after the hectic few days we’ve just had we think we deserve a well earned break. So we will now move to a small island just off the coast of Playa Del Carmen – Isla Cozumel. Although I think our time lazing on the beach might be limited, as apparently this is one of the best places in the world to go scuba diving. We’ll let you know if it can match our dive with the sharks in Tahiti in a few days time!

Tulum Photos

We always wanted to see a wild crocodile this trip - we hoped we'd get the chance in Australia, but no luck. So we were pretty pleased when we bumped into this lovely specimen in a lake near Coba ruins! Evil eyes...

Below you can see the two pyramids in Coba - the one on the right is surrounded by trees is in the central complex and too fragile to climb, but you could scale the pyramid inthe left photo for amazing views over the jungle. Well, we had no problems. But if you look at the photo carefully everyone except Gary is in trouble! Lots of them are sliding down a step at a time on thier bottoms... pathetic?!

Tulum Maya ruins have a gorgeous location on the sea shore... and fantastic reptilian inhabitants. This iguana was a small specimen, but he was quite happy to pose with me for a photo on the cliff top.

His big brother was quite willing to be photographed too! This one must have been nearly 2m long, and had an impressive range of spines down his back.

The lovely beach of Tulum ruins, with some Maya remains perched on the cliffs, and Gary basking in the sun. No lizards about this time!

And after a very hard day of rapid walking to see lots of lizards and Maya ruins, our hotel had some very relaxing options for the evening!